Economic Beat

The Right Way to Cut Entitlements

Means-testing is the ticket, not reliance on a different version of the consumer price index, as the Obama-Boehner plan suggests.

Alone among the economic measures, the consumer-price index serves as both thermometer and thermostat: What it says about the cost of living helps regulate what things cost, including the $821 billion worth of Social Security checks due to go out this year to 58 million Americans.

Each Social Security check is adjusted annually by a version of the CPI dubbed CPI-W, where W stands for wage-earner. Unlike the version of the index that is normally headlined each month -- CPI-U, where U stands for urban -- the W version is...